Photo: Nysun
The summer internship. Ugh. How terrible it is to be young and to have to spend one or more of what are frankly a limited amount of summers you will look good in a bathing suit clad in office casual, performing menial tasks for people who you believe, deep down, are stupider than you. Why should anyone have to suffer such a thing? These thoughts certainly crossed the minds of Genevieve Hudson-Price, Sabrina Blaichman, and Caroline Copley, three downtown kids whose parents helped them start a gallery this summer. Housed in a property lent to them by Sabrina’s father — developer Charles Blaichman, who also owns the building that houses Soho House and Spice Market — the gallery will exist until September, when the building will be knocked down to make way for a luxury hotel. It is called 7Eleven, a reference not only to the address but to “our society’s consumerism.”
Would you like to gently throttle them yet?
“I thought it was a great idea,” Mr. Blaichman said in an e-mail message written in all caps. “Instead of working for someone else as summer interns they would get real life experience building, organizing, and running their own gallery.”
Patrons of the gallery are “a combination of our parents’ mailing list and our mailing list,” Genevieve, the daughter of the painter Judith Hudson and the writer Richard Price, told the Sun, although making money is of course, “not a goal.” The gallery is altruistic, in a way, and though the artists are mostly their friends, they also include a 52-year-old Romanian “outsider” artist, Ionel Talpazan, who claims he was abducted by aliens and whose paintings reflect that experience. “He doesn’t have a phone or a computer, so we got his address and just showed up at this door in Harlem,” Caroline Copley (grandfather: William) told the paper.
Anyway, it is mostly for fun.
When a reporter visited the gallery on a recent afternoon, the atmosphere was low-key and familial. Ms. Hudson-Price and Ms. Copley were wearing outfits more suited to, say, riding bikes down to the beach in Amagansett than manning the front desk at Gagosian. Ms. Hudson-Price was wearing a ripped tie-dyed T-shirt, shorts, and artfully mismatched earrings; Ms. Copley was wearing a strapless sundress.
Wow, so they’ve gotten tans and and work experience that one could consider extremely valuable, as long as they never have to work with anyone else, ever.
